The lands attached to the old schloss in which we found ourselves, were in former times very extensive. When there were Dukes of Brandenburg, the lord of the place, it is said, was wont to go to war with his neighbours; on one occasion, when taken prisoner, he was obliged to ransom himself by ceding to the duke a large forest, which is still the property of the Crown. But the castle has passed through several hands since, and the whole estate now includes only twenty thousand acres, worth in fee about £30,000. Of these, about nine thousand are in forest, chiefly pine, four thousand in lakes and bogs, four thousand in arable culture, and three thousand rented in farms. These divisions include a considerable quantity of pasture and meadow land, and on the edge of the forests the sheep find food in summer. The soil is generally light and sandy, with a bed of clay marl at a greater or less depth below. The custom of the Prussian proprietors is to farm their own land, and thus they have extensive establishments, and carry on various branches of rural economy. The timber is felled, and either sold on the spot to merchants who come from a distance to buy, or is split up into billets and sent to the large towns for firewood; or, where a shipping place is accessible, is sawn into balks (balken) suitable for the English market. The pines are principally Scotch firs (Pinus sylvaticus); and here and there at the outskirts, or in the open glades of the forest, are seen magnificent trees of this species throwing out picturesque old arms, such as at times arrest the eye and step of the traveller in our Scottish highlands. Such he may see, for instance, on the borders of Loch Tula—the straggling relics of what were great forests in the days of our forefathers.
The arable land is chiefly under rye, of which great breadths are occasionally seen without fences or divisions. Already, where the snow had melted, the surface of these rye-fields was beautifully green. The average yield scarcely exceeds twenty bushels an acre, and it is often very much less. Were the labour and manure expended upon half the land, the profit, as our own experience has shown, would on the whole be much increased. Few root crops are grown, and these only on the low, black, and boggy land. The manures employed are what is made by the cattle and sheep, marl, black earth (moder) from the peaty bottoms, the pine leaves which are collected in the forests, and are known under the name of waldstrew (forest straw), and the wood and peaty ashes from their fires. It is common to grow rape for the seed; and then the proprietor, if he has the means, erects a crushing-mill, uses the cake for his cattle, and sells the oil. Of rape-cake it is usual to give about a quarter of a pound a-day to the horses—their other food being oats, pease, and rye, mixed in equal quantities, and given three times a-day with chopped straw ad libitum. Of his potatoes the lord makes brandy, and feeds his stock on the refuse which remains in the still. Thus, he is a distiller as well as an oil-crusher, and a distillery in most parts of Germany is a usual appendage to the farm. Only very small, usually waxy, potatoes are retained for table use, the large and mealy ones being given either to the pigs or to the brandy-maker. Then the lakes yield their share of revenue. They are fished in winter, with nets introduced through holes in the ice; and the take from the lakes in this quarter is sent to the market of Berlin. Thus the lord is a fish-merchant also. Some proprietors, again, begrudge the waste of wood ashes upon the land; and as these readily melt into glass, another way of adding to the revenue is to build a glass-house. Hence many small glass-houses are scattered about in the midst of the forests, and another complication is added to the affairs and the manifold accounts of the North Prussian landlord. If he possess a bed of good marl, he burns it into lime with his waste timber, and both sells and uses it. If he find good clay, he makes bricks and coarse pottery. Thus he attempts to develop everything, to turn everything into money. He is the sole capitalist. There is no division of labour. He monopolises all trades and wholesale commerce. He has large concerns, various establishments, numerous servants, intricate accounts, and withal, as we Englanders would expect, it is only one man here and there who makes things yearly better, and finally enriches himself. Thus the Prussian aristocracy are livers in the country, full of affairs, rarely reside in Berlin, and at the most come for a month or two to apartments in a hotel, and attend a few state balls and receptions given by the royal family, and return again to their country habits. Amid the limited society of the unproductive sandy plains these habits not unfrequently degenerate.
Upon this estate two farms were let to tenants. We visited one of them. It was let on a lease for fifteen years, contained 2000 acres of corn-land, and 550 of meadow. The rent was 1800 dollars in money, 200 in kind, and about 500 in taxes—in all, about 2500 dollars, or a dollar (3s.) an acre. The tenant had upon it 800 sheep, 14 cows, 18 draught-oxen, and 10 horses. Twelve families of labourers were lodged upon the farm, and extra labour was employed as required. Everything in the way of stock and implements was defective. The sheep are kept under cover in the winter. They are fed on hay, the breeding ewes receiving, besides, chopped turnips and carrots. The sheep-houses, both here and elsewhere, we found to be warm and comfortable. The lord worked his own land with 64 horses and 76 draught-oxen, and had a yearly increasing flock of sheep, amounting at present to 4500.
The farm labourers are but poorly off. Those who live on the farm (the hausinnen) receive for the man’s wage four silver groschen, and for the woman’s three silver groschen a-day. (Five silver groschen make an English sixpence.) They have a house, for which each of them, the man and woman, must pay two days a week in summer, one day and a half in autumn, and half a day in the three first months of the year. They are allowed also two acres of corn-land, and a third of an acre for a garden. They have pasture for a cow, and are permitted to cut the inferior wood on the heath for fuel, and to gather the pine-needles from the forest for manure. Day-labourers, not resident on the farm, receive 5 silver groschen a-day—the unhappy sixpence of our Irish peasant.
There are on the outside, and here and there indenting the large estate, numerous small properties of from five to eighty acres, formerly belonging to the lord, and many of them owing him still a yearly acknowledgment. These people, though in a sense independent, yet upon such land are generally poor. They keep one or two horses, or two cows, to plough their light sandy soil, from three to thirty sheep, and a few pigs. With a single horse a man will work his farm of forty or fifty acres. Milk is their principal diet, and many never eat meat once a year, unless it be a bit of their own home-fed pork.
In this part of Prussia the people are nearly all Roman Catholics. Most of the traffic is in the hands of Jews. Each sect has its own place of worship and its own school in the village. The Roman Catholic priest is nominated by the lord, and the evangelical minister and the Jewish rabbi must both be approved by him. There are six schools on the estate, which are under government inspection, and of which the salaries of the masters are paid by the estate. Religious instruction is not excluded from the schools, but each denomination has here at least its own school. The sectarian spirit is very bitter, especially on the part of the ignorant Romanists, against the evangelicals, whose church had gone down, but has lately been rebuilt, very much to the dissatisfaction of the dominant party. Hence, though Protestant children are sometimes found in the Romanist school, the contrary is never the case. On occasion of our visit, a grander display than usual was got up by the priest in honour of the English visitors of our host. The village Schüzerei, sixty strong, marched up on the Sunday morning, with music and banners, to escort us to church. The whole population had turned out to see the strangers. The church was crowded to suffocation; and to identify himself with the occasion, the priest got up a religious procession through and around the church. First went so many of the sharpshooters, carrying their muskets; next a party bearing the Virgin and Child under a canopy; then the Herrschaft from the schloss, with lighted candles in their hands; then the priest with the Host under a large canopy, borne by four men; and the procession was closed by the remainder of the armed Schüzer, and by men and women in great numbers from the congregation. Coming out at the west end of the church, it marched northwards round the church, through six inches of untrodden snow; and when the head of the procession again reached the west end, the priest stopped, and with him the people. He then elevated the Host, when down went men and women, all in adoration, kneeling in the cold snow. Our travelling-companion, who had never assisted at a Roman Catholic service, had accompanied the party to church, not knowing what awaited him, and he was indeed mortified when he found himself unintentionally, and from the goodness of his nature, involved in such an act of worship.
While the party were absent at church, we walked to an adjoining round hill for the purpose of enjoying the view, when, in a thin plantation which partially covered it, we stumbled upon the Jewish burying-ground. Scattered among the trees, here and there stood on end slabs of granite and other hard rock, split from the boulder-stones of which we have already spoken; and on the flat faces of these were graven large, beautifully clear, deeply cut, Hebrew characters, bearing, no doubt, the names and commemorating the virtues of the dead, and expressing the love and sorrow of the living. In this far-off region the lonely Hebrew graves, so far from the homes of the once-favoured people, recalled to our minds those distant days when the Euphrates saw them weeping disconsolate, and the oppressor, as now in Poland and its borders, treating them with contumely and despite.
“By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
“For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they that wasted us, mirth. Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?